Holy Trilogy: Conclusion

I have finished reading the Holy Trilogy (Hebrew Bible; New Testament; Qur'an). Achievement Unlocked!

It has taken me slightly less than a year, and during that time I have been figuring out where I stand on religious matters. This seems a good time to stop binge-reading books about religion and summarise the current state of my opinions.

I am, in a sense, deeply religious. I am addicted to the mystical experience, the feeling of being one with the universe in all its complexity and majesty, of 'lying on the bosom of the infinite world'*, and seeing everything aflame with radiance and significance. Throughout human history, this experience has variously been interpreted as a connection to the gods, God, Nirvana, Dao, etc. In the ancient world, I might have been a priest, a prophet, or a monk. Alas, modernity has saved me from that fate.

Having come from a science (and science fiction) background, traditional religious imagery is extremely unsatisfying. The 'miracles' are often underwhelming; the cosmologies are crass and tacky. While reading the Holy Trilogy, I was constantly reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars:

'Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.

The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.'

I have grown quite fond of some branches of theology, but their 'God' is so different to the usual view that, to avoid confusion, I would prefer not to use the word 'God'. Most people have never heard of Paul Tillich, let alone Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Sometimes I think of myself as an 'independent mystic'.

'God' is usually imagined as a divine tyrant, 'Heaven's awful monarch'**, who watches everything, wiretaps your thoughts, rewards those who think how he wants and do what he wants, punishes those who do not, and occasionally interferes with human history by helping out his homies or giving messages to arbitrarily chosen prophets who pass the message to the masses. The tyrant's earthly servants/slaves/sheep/flock do his bidding (whether good or evil), censor criticism, vilify doubters, and punish apostates with social exclusion or death.

This is a nightmarish idea. How would one choose any particular religion when they all claim divine inspiration, and their adherents all claim to Just Know? Am I to pick the religion as I was nominally raised in, and hope that since I was born into a first world country, I was also born into the One True Faith? What if I haven't passed the tyrant's test? What if I haven't been nice enough? What if the tyrant actually meant for his followers to obey all the awful stuff in the sacred text? What if I have been too nice?

It feels cheap to ridicule this idea, because it is so ridiculous.

I am happy to call myself a humanist. I believe that humans have the capacity to instil their lives with meaning and choose good over evil. I do not believe in an afterlife. I find writings about accepting death and the finitude of our existence more consoling and inspiring than any afterlife wankery. If there is an afterlife, it will be a pleasant surprise (unless the Wahhabi Muslims were right all along!), but I'm not getting my hopes up. Let's make the most of the one life we know we have.

Too much religion is characterised by dishonesty, dogmatism, and doublethink. There is so much awful stuff in the sacred texts. I have become, in a sense, deeply anti-religious. Perhaps we need a new synthesis, combining humanist values and reasoned enquiry with the best aspects of the traditional religions, to produce something which can, without hypocrisy, move with the times, doing away with the barbaric, the bigoted, and the bonkers.

*Friedrich Schleiermacher, 'On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers'
**Angel Gabriel, 'Paradise Lost', Book IV